www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro Toward a Concept of Afro-Brazilian Literature1 by Eduardo de Assis Duarte Translated by Melissa E. Schindler and Adelaine LaGuardia2 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Afro-Brazilian literature passed through a period full of realizations and discoveries that initiated a broadening of its corpus, both in prose and in poetry. This increase occurred in concert with the academic debates about the nature of its solidification as a specific field of literary production – distinct, although in permanent dialogue with Brazilian literature tout court. While many still question whether Afro-Brazilian literature really exists, every day, new research points to the vigor of this writing: for as much as it is contemporaneous, it is also long established, reaching well back into the eighteenth century to Domingos Caldas Barbosa. Likewise, for as often as it is written in large urban centers, by dozens of poets and authors of fiction, it also has a strong presence in rural areas and regional literatures. Take the example of the Maranhense José do Nascimento Moraes, author of, among other texts, the novel Vencidos e degenerados (1916).3 It tells the story of the decades that follow the abolition of slavery in Brazil (May 13, 1888), and attempts to show how the mentality produced by the institution of slavery continued even after its end. In short, this literature doesn’t merely exist; it makes itself known across the various historical periods and spaces relevant to our coming together as a people. It doesn’t simply exist; it is multiple and diverse. Since the 1980s, the work of writers who identify openly as individuals of African descent has grown in volume and has started to occupy a space in the cultural scene, just as, at the same time, the demands of the black movement have grown and acquired institutional visibility.4 Since then, there has also been a similar increase in academic studies about such literature, which, for most of the twentieth century, had been almost exclusively the object of study by foreign scholars like Bastide, Sayers, Rabassa and Brookshaw, among others.5 1 This article first appeared in Portuguese in Literatura e Afrodescendência no Brasil: antologia crítica; Volume 4: História, teoria, polêmica. (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2011.) 2 Translators´ note (hereafter abbreviated to “T.N.”): Duarte’s essay is the final chapter of a four-volume anthology organized by the same author. The essay seeks to synthesize the material that precedes it, and readers will find more information about the writers that Duarte mentions in the anthology itself. We have endeavored to reproduce faithfully the content of the essay. As such, excepting small changes necessary to preserve meaning in translation, we retain all of the text’s original emphases (italicization, quotation marks and emphatic punctuation), paragraph structure and notes. In moments where we felt it necessary to add words or phrases in order for an English-speaking readership, we enclosed such additions in square brackets. 3 T.N.: The word “Maranhense” refers to an individual from the state of Maranhão, located in the northwest corner of Brazil and far from the famous urban centers of the southeast (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte). 4 T.N.: For a number of reasons, publicly identifying as black or of African descent in Brazil is a politically charged act. Duarte and several other contributors to the anthology take up the issue, which merits much more dedicated analysis than the space of an explicatory note would allow. Suffice it to say that many of the same questions that Duarte raises about Afro-Brazilian and Black literature apply to the notion of Afro-Brazilian identity. For example, some authors choose to distance themselves this genre of literature, preferring instead to identify their work simply as “Brazilian literature. The same occurs with Brazilians and their national or ethnic identifications. 5 T.N.: Roger Bastide, Raymond Sayers, Gregory Rabassa and David Brookshaw. www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro Certainly, the seminal work of poets and writers who make up organizations like Quilombhoje, a group based in São Paulo but with satellites in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and other capitals, has contributed enormously to Afro-Brazilian literary production as a whole. Because of its unrelenting effort to broaden the horizon of its reading public, Afro Brazilian literature continues to acquire legitimacy in universities, evidenced in the growing number of undergraduate and graduate courses available to students, as well as in the publishing world. For example, the Cadernos Negros series has experienced three uninterrupted decades of continuous publica tion.6 Furthermore, an epic novel dedicated to the retrieval of the unofficial history of enslaved peoples and their forms of resistance, entitled Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves (2006), was published by a prominent editor and went on to win the much-coveted literary award, Prêmio Casa de las Américas. Two factors have contributed to creating a more favorable and receptive environment for arts marked by an ethnic identification with African descent. The first factor is the rise of the so-called black middle class, constituted as it is by an increasing number of professionals with postsecondary degrees who are seeking a place in both the work market and in the consumer world. The second is the institution of mechanisms like Law no 10.639/2003 and affirmative action policies.7 Such phenomena often fall outside of the purview of literary criticism and also, admittedly, the objectives of this essay. I mention them simply to provide a proper background for the discussion presented here and to remind the reader that the greater the public and the demand, the greater the responsibilities of the agents who occupy spaces of research and of knowledge production, in particular the institutions of higher learning. Thus, the moment is ripe for the construction of theoretical tools that are effective enough to foster further critical reflection. We must equip scholars with more precise working instruments. With that in mind, it would be useful to evaluate the “status of the art” of two of these instruments, specifically, the concepts of Black literature and of Afro-Brazilian literature. The publication of Cadernos added much to the discursive construction of a concept of Black literature. Since 1978, the series has consistently published work, be it prose or poetry, which is marked predominantly by a tone of protest against racism, preserving, as Florentina de Silva Souza demonstrates, the militant tradition of the Black Movement (2005). And, from this perspective, certain themes in Cadernos stand out: that of black people, as individuals and as a collective, and the theme of social recognition and cultural memory. Moreover, the series actively searches for a public of African descent, which it has achieved through the institutionalization of a language that rejects stereotypes as discursive agents of discrimination. For instance, in an interview with Luiza Lobo, Ironides Rodrigues, one of the most vocal intellectuals of the generation that preceded Quilombhoje, declares the following: Black literature is that which is created by a black or mulato author who writes about his race from the perspective of what it means to be black, to be black in color, to identify publicly as black, and to discuss the issues that matter to him 6 T.N.: In keeping with the original text, references to Cadernos Negros are sometimes shortened to Cadernos. 7T.N.: Instituted in 2003, Law 10.639 mandates curriculum changes in in the Brazilian education system, with the purpose of allocating a certain amount of the syllabus to themes having to do with contemporary Africa, current relations between Brazil and African countries, and the history of Africans in Brazil. www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro as such: religion, society, racism. He has to identify openly – to declare publicly – that he is black. (266) Throughout its existence, Cadernos seldom distanced itself from this adamant position – which soon became its trademark –, a position which ended up pulling it away from a line of thinking that is less committed to militancy, like, for example, that expressed by poets Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Ronald Augusto, by prose writers like Muniz Sodré, Nei Lopes, Joel Rufino dos Santos or, in the field of children’s literature, by Júlio Emílio Braz, Rogério Andrade Barbosa, Joel Rufino dos Santos (the same as above), along with Heloisa Pires de Lima, just to cite a few of the contemporary authors. On the other hand, looking back to the first half of the twentieth century, we would be remiss not to mention the modernist tradition of negrismo exemplified in the work of: Jorge de Lima, Raul Bopp, Menotti del Picchia, Cassiano Ricardo or the writers of the group Leite Criôlo in Minas Gerias, among others.8 There would be no way for us to compare such examples to the work of Cuti, Miriam Alves or Conceição Evaristo: what could possibly be similar, from any theoretical angle, between Ponciá Vicêncio and Nega Fulô?9 The point-of-view that orients the perspective of Poemas negros, by Jorge de Lima, is totally other, external and folkloric, something akin to what Oswald de Andrade called “macumba for tourists.”10 And for as much as Urucungo, by Raul Bopp, employs rhythms and intonations derived from an Afro-Brazilian oral culture, there is no way to deny that the black literature of these authors is entirely other. In line with the legendary modernist tradition, Benedita Gouveia Damasceno also confers on the concept [of negrismo] a distinct meaning and one that is even opposed to that which Quilombhoje practices: a meaning marked by a thematic reductionism that doesn’t account for ethnic be longing and authorial perspective.